Ukraine says its drones hit a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland, a first in open Baltic waters

The strike

Ukraine’s SBU security service said it targeted the Russian ship Naro-Fominsk as part of a wider drone operation against Russia’s Ust-Luga oil export terminal on the Baltic coast, the BBC reported. It described the vessel as a Buyan-M class small corvette carrying Kalibr and Oniks cruise missiles.

Finland’s military confirmed it had detected the strike. A spokesperson told Reuters in an email, Al Jazeera reported, that its forces had detected a strike on a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland area and that Finland was not under any immediate military threat. Estonia’s defence minister, Martin Herem, told the broadcaster ERR that the ship was hit at about 05:30 (03:30 GMT) on Wednesday, but did not say how.

“We know that smoke came from the ship afterwards. The ship itself went back towards St Petersburg.”

Martin Herem, Estonian defence minister, BBC News World

A first in the Baltic

The attack is thought to be the first time Ukrainian drones have hit a Russian ship in an area of the Baltic Sea open to civilian shipping. Finland’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, insisted that the sea remained stable and safe and that marine traffic faced no threat. Finnish defence officials are understood to have stressed to Kyiv that the gulf is a narrow waterway used by oil tankers and civilian ships, and home to subsea data cables, the BBC said.

The military analyst Emil Kastehelmi of the Black Bird monitoring group told the BBC that Russia’s Baltic fleet had been untouched until now, but he did not consider the strike a serious escalation. Moscow has given no details of damage or casualties.

Drones over the region

Several storage tanks at Ust-Luga are thought to have been hit overnight, and fires at the port were visible from Estonia. Herem said drones flew over the area from midnight until about 06:00, mostly close to the Estonian border in Russian airspace, and one briefly entered Estonian airspace from Latvia. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania told citizens to take shelter and NATO jets were scrambled, Al Jazeera reported. Russia said it had intercepted at least 146 Ukrainian drones over the Leningrad region in recent days.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Heorhiy Tykhyy, called Russian claims that Kyiv had used Baltic airspace “baseless”, while acknowledging that incidents might occur when Russia diverts drones with electronic warfare. The strike came as the US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow and then Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ireland.